The Influence of Jacob Strauss on the Anabaptists. A Problem in Historical Methodology.

Abstract

In a stimulating essay on methodology in intellectual history, Quentin Skinner decides that most historians of ideas, as well as social scientists working with ideas within history, place themselves into one of two camps or orthodoxies as he calls them, which stand diametrically opposed to each other on crucial questions of interpretation and meaning.1 Those in the one camp decide that the text alone is determinative for meaning. The scholar need not examine contextual factors in order to ascertain meaning. Those within the other orthodoxy insist that meaning is revealed entirely by examination of context, by holding up a framework of religious, social, economic and political factors, within which framework alone ideas can be understood.